America's Uncivil Wars The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon • MARK HAMILTON LYTLE New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2006 / Tilt: Grt:at Freak Forward I 195 9 The Great Freak Forward In 1958, MaoTse-tung organized "the great leap forward" to mobilize the peasant masses of China's countryside. Six years later, a group from La Honda, California, set off on a cross-country trek to disorganize the America masses. "Get them into your movie before they get you into theirs," Ken Kesey told his motley crew. The set was America; the cast-the Merry Pranksters and anybody in their path. The vehicle was a 19 3 9 International Harvester school bus laid out with bunks, a refrigerator, and a sound system amplified to blow your socks off. If the sound failed to make an impression, the bright, swirling Day-Glo paint job certainly would. A hole in the roof allowed the passengers an unimpeded view of the world. The crew, in their long J4ir, costumes, masks, body paint, and irreverent swatches of American flag, looked as outrageous as the bus. Kesey financed the coast-to-coast acid bacchanalia with proceeds from his critically and commercially Ken Kesey's 1939 Internatioaal Harvester bus, Further, became a visual icon of the new acid­ inspired psychedelic subculture. (Source: Counesy of Don WllllamsiNew Millenium Writings) successful novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. That novel had featured Chief Broom, a precursor of the counterculture's fascination with Native Americans, and McMurphy, the rebel who blew the minds of the authoritarians who tried to transformation. Most trippers thought that LSD had the power to liberate people suffocate his irrepressible spirit. Along with Kesey, who called himself "the Swash­ from the repressive forms of society and return them to a state of nature. Drug­ buckler," the crew included such acid luminaries as cameraman Mal Function, the induced visions inspired transcendence to a higher creative and spiritual plain. LSD Intrepid Traveler, Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, Doris Delay. and at the wheel was not about thinking, but about feeling; it moved people into "the ever widening and fresh out of San Quentin prison, the amphetamine-chewing "holy primitive" Present." In short, psychedelics had the power to remake consciousness and thereby of the Beats, Neal Cassady. On board to record the story of this antic odyssey was to redefine reality, or so Kesey and his Pranksters believed. There was a touch of neo­ Tom Wolfe, a leading practitioner of the "new journalism." Unlike reporters religious proselytizing in their enthusiasm for drugs. "The purpose of psychedelics," whose traditions of objectivity prevented them from revealing themselves in a Kesey once commented, "is to learn the conditioned responses of people and then to story, the new journalists and their experiences were the story. And this story of prank them. That's the only way to get people to ask questions, and until they ask Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters became The Electric Kooi-Aid Acid Test, one of the questions they're going to remain conditioned robots." Of course, with the bibles of the emerging counterculture. Pranksters, you never knew when they were simply pulling your leg or, as Kesey put After a stint as a laboratory guinea pig in which he sampled hallucinogenic and it, "tootling the masses." psychedelic drugs, Kesey had settled near the coast in La Honda. There, he contin­ No matter what higher purpose the Pranksters might claim, they were above all ued to initiate a band of friends, faculty from nearby Stanford, beatniks, and about fun. In July of 1964, they drove the bus into Phoenix to help the Republicans dropout kids into the mind-bending properties of LSD. Never one short of words, celebrate their convention. GOP conservatives were in the process of anointing Kesey described the early. untutored trips as "shell-shattering ordeals that left us Barry Goldwater while humiliating Nelson Rockefeller as a symbol of the eastern, blinking kneedeep in the crack crusts of our pie-in-the-sky personalities. Suddenly internationalist liberal establislunent. Imagine, then, the sight of the Merry people were stripped before one another and behold: we were beautiful. Naked and Pranksters, decked out in American flag outfits and body paint, descending on these helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning but far more human than that shin­ pillars of tradition. What planet had tlwsc aliens descended from? The sign on the ing nightmare that had stood creaking at parade rest. Wt' were alive and life was us." h.ll'k of tht'ir bus warned "Caution: Weird J.oad." Thl' banner they waved In that outburst, Kesey captured the link ht·twt•t·n I.SO and tht' culturalupheJV.lls ·"'"' IIIIICl'tl, .. A v.. ,,. ,; ... lkrry <ioltlw.llt•r ,, .I v.. h· fi ... Frrn." c;nldw.tll'r, whik 1111 of tdr~ of JH.'fSOIIdl .urd \tllfil'tl 111111h hm of duh of till' tllll'ivil w.1rs. Firs!, Kt•st·y lwl spokt·ll tilt' n·vl'l,lllctll ~hirl, wo~~ o~hout .a~ o1~ d vl.1~~ ""'d I IJ(, liNciVII. WARS AMI·.Rir:<~'s The Great Freak Forward I 197 Upon their arrival in New York City, cool Beat collided with hot Prankster as dismissed for cause in the twentieth century. Leary soon followed him out of the Cassady brought Jack Kerouac to meet Kesey and cohorts. All that West Coast groves of academe. As a parting shot, he told reporters that LSD was "more impor­ madness-lights flashing, rock blaring, and an American flag-adorned sofa-was tant than Harvard" and spoke disparagingly of the university as "the establishment's too much for Kerouac. Were they Communists? he asked as he folded the flag. He apparatus for training consciousness contractors" for an "intellectual ministry of de­ soon retreated to Massachusetts, where he lived with his mother. Tom Wolfe saw the fense." The whiff of scandal in Cambridge caught the attention of major news meeting as a passing of the guard: "Kerouac was the old star. Kesey was the wild media, for whom Leary provided an intriguing story. As they publicized his run-in new comet from the West heading Christ knew where." So then it was on to with the university. they informed the nation about a drug that had entered America Millbrook, where the eastern and western acid all-stars would meet for their first as a potential "truth serum" for the CIA. In fact, a CIA agent provided Leary with attempt to mind meld. much of his experimental drug supply. Leary's indictment of Harvard, though not Millbrook, about seventy miles north of New York City, was the center of hunt overtly political, had much the same spirit that inspired the FSM at Berkeley a year country. where wealthy New Yorkers came to their weekend estates to ride to the later. Both challenged authority, chafed at arbitrary rules that restricted personal hounds in the scenic hills of Dutchess County. At one of the grander estates, William freedom, and flaunted convention. LSD and marijuana helped protestors pass the Hitchcock had turned his mansion over to former Harvard professor Timothy Leary night in Sproul Hall during the FSM sit-in. And both movements involved members and a band of psychedelic experimenters called the International Federation for of the nation's elite dissenting from established cultural norms. Internal Freedom (IFIF). IFIF saw LSD as a means to achieve their goal of returning After retreating to Mexico and being expelled from there, Leary and IFIF settled "to man's sense of nearness to himself and others, the sense of social reality that in Millbrook. His group established as their goal the discovery and nurturing of the civilized man has lost." Le~ first discovered psychedelics as a faculty member at divinity in each person. The idea was to incorporate the acid high into normal con­ Harvard, where students and faculty had participated in CIA-funded experiments in sciousness. A hint of academia carried over as participants carefully recorded and the 1950s. Leary's research dealt with psilocybin, the chemical agent in magic discussed their insights. Some participants tripped occasionally; some stayed stoned mushrooms. In 1960, he first tried psilocybin while on vacation in Mexico. The for days on end. Rumor had it that the children and dogs were high as well. Such mushroom sent him on the "deepest religious experience" of his life. "I discovered an environment inevitably took on the aspect of a permanent party. Like the that beauty, revelation, sensuality. the cellular history of the past, God, the Devil­ Pranksters, Leary and his band were having fun. To pay the bills, they invited guests all lie inside my body outside my mind," he reported. to weekend workshops where they explored non-drug induced mind-altering Back at Harvard, he became a combination of experimenter, missionary, revo­ techniques such as yoga, Zen meditation, and encounter groups. Leary discovered lutionary, and huckster. In his lab, he and his research team explored both the in The Tibetan Book of the Dead what he thought was a remarkable appreciation for the consciousness altering and religious effects of the drug. LSD proved far more "nature of experiences encountered in the ecstatic state." He transformed it into a potent, and to Leary's mind more "consciousness expanding," than psilocybin. It psychedelic manual and began to proselytize with his mantra "tune in, tum on, and soon became a central part of his research agenda. He doled it out to almost any drop out." colleague or student who expressed an interest. One of his early converts was a About the time Dylan met the Beatles in New York, Kesey and the Pranksters prominent Washington socialite and wife of a senior CIA official, Mary Pinchot.